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Share the Love: Events, Favorites and Sharegroups

As you get ready for wedding season, we want to send a friendly reminder to any of you out there who may still be scared of one of our favorite Business features: Events.

Don’t be intimidated, because Events are just what the doctor ordered to keep your friends, fans and family sane. If you’ve never used this feature — or its little brother, Sharegroups, available to Basic, Power and Portfolio members — here are just a few reasons why you should dive in and give it a whirl.

1. Your friends will thank you.

Instead of sending a huge catalog of links to your wedding guests, send just one. Both Events and Sharegroups are “islands” that contain as many galleries as you wish, so there’s no need for guests to get off track. Mentally, it’s an easier and more friendly approach… especially since you get to pick the URL.

In short, you share just one link and your visitors don’t have to poke around your vacation pics looking for the bride.

2. You can exercise your OCD tendencies.

Events come bundled with lots of cool features, like a place to display a slideshow of favorites and details about the shoot, the ability to add in as many galleries as you wish and arrange them, email templates for sharing and lots more. Everything stays neat and tidy, and you can use all the options or just a few. Best of all, each client (we call them “Participants”) gets their own special view of the Event, and a unique gallery to hold their Favorites. So whether it’s the bride, her mom or a favorite aunt, their selections don’t get mixed up.

Sharegroups are the simplified version of the above: Bundle all the galleries you want under one Sharegroup and share the link. Like Events, you can enter a description and sort the included galleries in whatever order you wish. You’re still able to tweak ’til it squeaks.

3. You stay in control.

You’re the star; everyone’s waiting with bated breath to see your photos. When you’re ready, release all their galleries with one click, and (if you have a Business account) keep track of everyone who takes a look. The secret? Events’ registration feature. Just toggle the Registration setting to “Required” and anyone viewing your Event will be asked for their email address.

Both Events and Sharegroups can be locked down with viewing passwords, so images don’t fall into the wrong hands.

The 2-Minute Guide to Making Your First Event (or Sharegroup)

1. Make it.

To create an Event, open up your Account Settings and look under “Business.” Click on the “Making Money” tab and you can manage your Events on the right:

For Sharegroups, look under your Accounts Settings‘ “Discovery” tab and find Sharegroups under the “Sharing” tab:

2. Give the details.

Once you’ve opened the manager, click the “New” button at the top right and fill in your details.

3. Add the good stuff.

You can add galleries and Participants right away to Events. Don’t forget to click “Save” once you do!

For Sharegroups, you’ll have to save your new Sharegroup first, then go back to add the galleries to it.

If you want all the details about how these features work, check out our help pages for all the info. We’ve got a few other articles in our resource center for Pros on the endless benefits of Events, too.

18 thoughts on “Share the Love: Events, Favorites and Sharegroups”

So close, but really, you need additional gallery levels to actually encapsulate the sub sections of a wedding (getting ready, first look, ceremony) under the umbrella of the actual wedding. Also, while we are talking about Events, there needs to be a way for the user to break out of the event’s ‘favorites’ view. What I mean is that it’s great that people can tag their favorites, but as soon as they click “view favorites” they take a one-way link to a new view without an intuitive and easy way to get back to choosing more favorites. Lastly, coupons are great for my clients, but they definitely need to be able to add them when they start to see how it effects their current purchase, not on the back end of the cart just after they put in their credit card info.

Events would be great if I could mass email to everybody all at once or pull everyone’s email address into a spreadsheet for my personal use or even track email sent through SmugMug. These features it be nice to have… necessary to have. also being able to apply coupons to individual products for clients to take advantage of would be a nice feature… again almost necessary for any Smug Mug Pro looking to make money on a sale.

Great comments Sean, I echo the thought on NAVIGATION. There is NOT an easy way for users to intuitively back up and I continually get questions on this and lose viewers/page views because they can’t just just back up and go to a different album easily.

I completely agree with John. We need to be able to pull all those email addresses so that we can send a group email – actually market to those people. Pictage had a way to do that, and you guys do almost everything better than them. Figure this out! We’ll talk again at WPPI!

I agree with Kim and John…. What if when saving an email we have a choice of adding those emails to a certain group or creating a new group to add it to…. Then when we send the mass emails we can choose the group we would like to send it to.

Hi Pete, that’s an awesome idea. Thank you for weighing in and we’d love to add additional email features like this! Do you mind also adding this suggestion in to our official Feedback forum? This way we can be absolutely sure it’s been voted for: http://feedback.smugmug.com/

Hi Kirk, Events are available at the Business level only and as stated near the top, Sharegroups are available at all levels. The main difference between Portfolio and Business accounts is the availability of the advanced marketing features like Events (and Packages, Coupons, etc). Hope this helps clear things up.

Kirk, it looks like you have a Portfolio account. A few months ago we made a change to our Pro-level account by splitting them into Portfolio and Business accounts, based on the trends we were seeing in the different kinds of pros that used SmugMug. If you need any help getting your subscription sorted or if you have any questions at all, could you contact our Support Heroes? They are always standing by and ready to help, and we want to be sure that you have the perfect account for your needs: http://help.smugmug.com/

I too have been wishing for a way to make email groups to send things to rather than having to enter one at a time each time I make an event. I have lost business with at clients in the past who found navigating my events too cumbersome. I stopped using for the most part because it was time consuming on my end to set up the share portion and because I had complaints regarding the difficulty navigating. If these areas were better, it would be perfect.

Hi Robin and thanks so much for your detailed feedback. We’re aware that there are some improvements that working pros like you have been requesting and I’ll be sure that someone on our Product team sees your comments. Thanks!

another issue I’ve been running into is at the events level when somebody has a favorites gallery my packages do not show up in their favorites gallery without me adding those packages to the list 1 by 1.

Also, coupons are great but so limited. I really really wish that we could add coupons for certain products or print sizes and not apply them across the entire board. essentially I would have to build an entire product list and make the product that I wanted on sale to reflect that which is way too much work.

another issue I’ve been running into is at the events level when somebody has a favorites gallery my packages do not show up in their favorites gallery without me adding those packages to the list 1 by 1.

Also, coupons are great but so limited. I really really wish that we could add coupons for certain products or print sizes and not apply them across the entire board. essentially I would have to build an entire product list and make the product that I wanted on sale to reflect that which is way too much work.

John, thanks for this valuable feedback. I’ll be sure our Product team sees this as we definitely want to improve things to make it easier for running your business. Thanks so much!